New Koobface Campaign Making Rounds on Facebook

Security researchers at the web and e-mail security firm, Websense have identified a new personal message spam campaign, which is making rounds on the social networking website, Facebook and propagating the infamous worm Koobface.

This private message comes with a subject line of "Check out the movies wsith yor ass in it" and promotes a hyperlink that redirects users to a bit.ly URL via Facebook's open redirector. Facebook's redirect script, via which all external links are usually passed, has been increasingly exploited recently to evade spam filters and related techniques.

The malicious link directs users via a series of redirects that verify if they originate from facebook.com. In case, if they are coming from Facebook, they are directed to the attack page and if it is not originating from Facebook, they are directed to Google News Canada.

In the conventional Koobface manner, the final malicious webpage displays a bogus video player with a message stating that, to interpret this content users are required to download Adobe Flash Player 10.37 and would they prefer installing that.

This social engineering scam is one the Koobface creator's quite much established and utilized on a large scale. Since then, this trick has been picked up by several cyber gangs.

Security experts at the security firm stated that, the Koobface variant, which was used in the recent spam campaign was identified by only 16 of 43 antivirus programs on Virus Total.

Interestingly, this is not the first time when, Koobface has targeted Facebook. Koobface is quite famous for infecting machines via spam e-mail messages on the social networking service, which, at present, has over 500 Million users around the globe. Since its first appearance in 2008, Koobface shares hostile vibes with the social networking websites. Conventionally, Koobface attacks Windows users not only on Facebook, but also on other websites such as, Twitter, Hi5, MySpace etc.

Conclusively, spam attacks such as the above stated ones once again proved correct the prediction made by security vendor "Websense" experts during the starting of 2011, as per which, social media users were estimated to be vulnerable to even increased spam campaigns in 2011. Hence, to avoid such attacks users are recommended to install effective Internet security software.